March 6 , 2008

The General Congregation is coming to an end, and so too we are closing this channel of communication which we opened during these past two months to keep all of our friends informed about what was going on.

The comments we have received and the number of people and the number of hits on our website are enough to confirm that we have achieved our objective. We are content and also exhausted, but before ending we cannot but thank the huge number of people who have cooperated to make www.sjweb.info/35 possible.

The first ones to whom we extend our thanks are all of the delegates who gave of their valuable time to write up the articles that appeared on the web: Antoine Kerhuel, Brad Schaeffer, Hans Zollner, Jesús Zaglul, Jim Corkery, José J. Romero, Josy Birsens, Michael Kennedy, Nicolas Standaert, Robert Geisinger, and Vincent M. Cooke. We especially want to thank our faithful “bloggers” who week after week have written their insights, ideas, and reflections in what has become the first official blog in the history of the Society’s General Congregation: Etienne Grieu, Eugène Goussikindey, Francis de Mello, Hector D’Souza, Hermann Rodríguez, Jose Ignacio García, Louis Gendron, Rafael Velasco, and Robert Scullin. And we don’t want to forget those who gave us interviews and who spoke in front of the microphones of our communications team: Arturo Sosa, Augustin Karekezi, Carlos Carneiro, David Smolira, Eugenio Valenzuela, Jerry Rosario, Jose Magadia, Luis Magriñá, Mark Raper, Michael Holman, Roberto Jaramillo, Salim Daccache, and Szabolcs Sajgó.

The universality of the Society has allowed us to work across distances with a team of translators who wrote us every night from Peru, Boston, and Washington and translated our texts so that they would be ready the following morning: Bernardo Haour, Jaime Regan, Mateo Garr, and Rómulo Franco. We need to mention especially those translators who were present here at the Congregation who, in spite of the long hours they worked on simultaneous translations, used their free time to translate the written texts. We are eternally grateful to Ed Schmidt, Antoine Paumard, Pep Boades, Luis Tampe, Jose Ignacio Badenes, Dominic Robinson, Oliver Bort, Georges Cheung, and Guilhem Causse. We also want to mention the emergency translators who helped out when most needed: Alberto Ares, Cristóbal Fones, Memo Prieto, Pablo Veiga, Angelo Schettini, Vicente Chong, César Torres, André Brouillete, and Anthony Soohoo.

The prayer content on the webpage was developed by the liturgy team from the General Congregation, and our thanks go to all of them: especially to Vlastimil Dufka who sent us each morning the prayer that was recited that day at the Congregation meetings. We owe a whole lot to Ignacio Dinmbier and Gonzalo Castro for their work with the video-prayers. Similarly our thanks go to all of those who gave their permission to use their materials on the web (music, pictures, and videos) who have helped out in one way or another to prepare that information, especially John Withney for his excellent photos.

To conclude, we need to recognize that the communication team would not have been able to fulfill its mission if it hadn’t been for a group of persons who have been cooperating all along in the elaboration of the content, especially Héléne Reychler and Marina Cioccolonni, of the press office, and Caterina Talloru of the communication office.

Finally, we owe a great debt to Giuseppe Riggio for his patience and immeasurable help in the translations to Italian and to Uta Sievers for her countless suggestions and creativity and not only for being one of the voices in the interviews but also one of the “hidden hands” in a large part of content.

The communications team has been supported continually and guided by a committee whose members were Tom Smolich, John Dardis, and Thierry Lamboley. We thank them for their professionalism, their understanding, and their unconditional help and guidance.

As you can see, this has all been a magnificent example of team work. Thanks to all for making possible this first webpage in the history of the General Congregations.

The Communication Team for GC35: Tom Rochford, Pierre Bélanger, and Dani Villanueva.

© 2008 Society of Jesus » www.sjweb.info/35